The past is never dead. It's not even past
Not Even Past republishes this moving and insightful article on returning to Texas by Jonathan Cortez to celebrate them joining the faculty of the Department of History at UT Austin as an Assistant Professor of Borderlands History. Dr. Cortez wrote this piece about returning to Texas to teach after 10 years on the East Coast […]
Inspired by a never-finished ceremonial cup of coffee in Ethiopia and a Jules Michelet quote attributing the Enlightenment to the advent of coffee, author Stewart Lee Allen dives head-first into a voyage across the world to trace the path coffee took out of Africa. In The Devil’s Cup: A History of the World According to […]
Moscow’s southeast neighborhoods of Maryino and Lyublino always seem to be where the authorities locate controversial events. On March 1, 2024, it was Maryino who hosted the funeral of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. The church that held the ceremony is a post-Soviet building and dominates the center of a neighborhood otherwise filled with high-rise apartments, […]
In my research on the social history of modern China, I have long focused, first, on how ordinary people lived their everyday life in a local community, such as a village, a production team, a factory or a workshop within it, during times of historical change. And, second, on how their personal experiences differed from […]
The legal cases of activists, including Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and the Chicago Seven, captured public attention throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Crowds crammed into courtrooms to watch these high-profile cases unfold, and many people became directly involved in efforts to free the defendants. While the United States has a long history of trying and […]
Since its creation in 2010, Not Even Past has published a wide range of resources connected to Black History written by faculty and graduate students at UT and beyond. To mark Black History Month, we have collected them into one compilation page organized around 11 topics. These articles showcase groundbreaking research, but they are also […]
The United States became an influential global actor during the twentieth century, cementing its role on the world stage through decisive interventions in both World Wars and via a range of US cultural and technological innovations. So pervasive was the US presence that some scholars have since christened this era the “American Century.” In Catastrophic […]
Using the goldfields in Kedougou in southeastern Senegal, historian and anthropologist Robyn D’Avignon, in Ritual Geology, explores the instrumentality of African indigenous knowledge systems in developing modern mining economies in French West Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. D’Avignon defines ritual geology as a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the […]
Pick up the camera. Aim, kneel, shoot. He hides behind a pair of rough hands. Inscribed in the knuckles: “Lupita.” Another shot followed by instant regret. Somehow, taking that photograph reminded you of the power dynamics—the violence—immersed in the asymmetrical act of representing others. Let the camera hang around your neck again. It never felt […]
Historians take a lot of notes, especially when it comes to our primary sources. For those of us who are fortunate enough to have access to digitized sources, our notes keep a record of our thoughts on the material in question and its use in our research. For those using sources that are not digitized […]